The feeling of energy a watch gives away is crucial. Suffice to remember that all photographed timepieces are staged with their hands showing 10 past 10, thus drawing a smile, or a dynamic angle, or some sort of elevation. Yet this energy isn't prevalent enough to shape a category of its own. It's rather a consequence of designs which are mostly after other motives, other benefits.
As a result, dynamic displays take on many shapes and forms, varying even more from one brand to the next. Some of them are capable of remaining tame while playing a different angle. For instance, Maurice Lacroix isn't breaking up the rules of design but their small seconds shaped initially as a square wheel creates quite the dynamic, which remains intact now that it's been shaped after a heart.
Energy also stems from layout. An off-centered display coupled with graphically strong elements like with Armin Strom's Lady Beat, a hand that's much more that just a hand like Ulysse Nardin's Freak X's and there you have a whole new momentum. The same goes for the EMC from Urwerk, where an almost off-keel layout translates a vivid sense of daring, smarts and appetite for rupture.
The dynamic also comes from offset, asymmetry, and split indications. For example, Trilobe do just that with their Les Matinaux collection : they use three discs located within one another, which are not concentric and whose pointers are not aligned. Using dome-shaped indicators help rank MB&F's Frog X among amphibians...sorry, UFOs...no, that's not it either...
And then there are those displays that are litterally dynamic. HYT had paved the way by telling time with hair-thin tubes filled with a colored fluid, a principele that's still in use on the Flow, where it's coupled with an internal lighting system. These indications in uber motion have peeked with Genus. They use a train of indices which are following an eight-shaped path on the dial to tell the minutes. This is more than dynamic. This is movement in motion.
